Should we upgrade photosynthesis and grow supercrops?

[GliderGuider]

Should we upgrade photosynthesis and grow supercrops?

Scientists have long dreamed of upgrading crop plants with the better photosynthetic machinery of free-living cyanobacteria. Until recently all attempts had failed, but now they've taken a huge step forward.

A joint team from Cornell University in New York and Rothamsted Research in the UK has successfully replaced a key enzyme in tobacco plants with a faster version from a cyanobacterium (Nature, vol 513, p 547). Their success promises huge gains in agricultural productivity – but is likely to become controversial as people wake up to the implications.

Upgrading photosynthesis is a different story. If biologists succeed in boosting it by 25 per cent or more, the upgraded plants are going to have a big advantage over their unmodified cousins. And that could spell trouble.

There is a precedent. About 30 million years ago some plants evolved a way to concentrate CO2 like cyanobacteria do. These are called C4 plants, and although they make up only 4 per cent of plant species, they account for 25 per cent of plant biomass. Look out over a grassy savannah and just about every living thing you see will be a C4 plant.

If we fill our fields with supercrops and plant forests of supertrees it seems inevitable that they will turn feral and, like C4 plants before them, come to dominate some ecosystems – though it might take millennia. That prospect will horrify many. When anti-GM campaigners start protesting against the introduction of turbocharged crops, they will have a point: the wisdom of growing superplants in open fields is definitely debatable.

But the arguments in favour – boosting agricultural yield to feed more people with less land while also sucking more CO2 out of the atmosphere – are also powerful. And there's another side to it. Wild animals need to eat too, and we're not leaving much for them. An ecosystem based on superplants would support more life overall.

We just can't leave Mother Nature alone, can we? It's not in our nature, I guess.

[CBGLuthier]

1. I think if you believe in science it is time to stop believing in "Mother Nature"

[NYC_SKP]

3. The arrogance of our species will be our undoing.

We haven't risen to the level of collective intelligence required to understand that science obeys nature's laws.

[drynberg]

4. AGREED

GMOs and their ilk are going to be killing almost as many as our fracking...total greed combined with a dash of overconfidence and seeped in dim wittedness to think we know more than hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

[DetlefK]

6. What is that supposed to mean?

1. Why would collective intelligence be needed to draw such a conclusion?

2. Nature's laws? That depends. Scientific theories are actually more tricky and convoluted than you think.
Some are derived from other theories via mathematics. We know where they come from, we know what they do, we don't know if they are realistic.
Other "laws of nature" are derived empirically. It works, but we have no idea why.

Once I read an online-comment where somebody demanded that scientists stop trying to find out the small issues and try deciphering the final law of nature that everything depends on. Once we have that figured out, all the rest can be deduced form it.

That's what people often forget about science: It's always guess-work and nothing can be proven with ultimate certainty.
Newton's laws? A variant of the theory of special relativity.
Newtonian theory of gravity? A part of the theory of common relativity.
Born's interpretation of quantum-mechanics? Invalid once we go to relativistic systems.

There is no way of knowing whether the "laws of nature" you consider infallible actually have a loophole that we haven't discovered yet.

[NYC_SKP]

7. Fuck theories, I said nothing about scientific "theory". "Scientists" are often the most arrogant.

I think you and I are talking about different things.

We haven't risen to the level of collective intelligence required to understand that science obeys nature's laws.

I could have been more careful with my choice of words.

I should have said that whatever we do, our technology and choices will have consequences that obey the laws of nature; physical, chemical, biological laws and all the rest.

They exist without scientists and, indeed, without the study of them (science).

[marym625]

2. Very interesting debate. thanks for the post.

[KurtNYC]

5. They say this stuff is to "feed more people with less land"

but that ignores the reasons that many people are under fed: war, access to food, extreme poverty, lack of water, ethanol, meat production and corruption.

Meanwhile, the US is finishing one of the biggest corn harvests on record which has pushed prices so low that farmers would not be able to afford to harvest it without the Federal subsidies which will likely be triggered, costing tax payers billions:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101947544

[DetlefK]

8. I say yes, because being alive is no inalienable right and evolution happens. (long post)

People tend to forget that humanity is not separate from nature, just because we're intelligent. We obey by the same rules as everybody: We multiply to stave off death, we influence our environment, we adapt to changes in our environment.

About half a billion years ago there was a drastic change in the stoichiometry of the atmosphere: The waste-gas oxygen showed up in massive amounts, simply because there were so many bacteria producing it. As a result, scores of bacterial dynasties died out because oxygen was poisonous to them. Genetic bloodlines tracing back to the very origin of life... gone forever.
About 65 million years ago, a random incident caused the dinosaurs to die out and allowed filthy little life-forms, evolved to make ends meet with the scraps falling from the dinner-tables of huge, efficient terror-beasts, to fill now-vacant ecological niches.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, some monkeys made it from Africa to South-America and changed the ecological system.
Hundreds of years ago, rats made it to isolated pacific islands and changed the ecological systems. Dingos in Australia, pythons in Northern America, raccoons in Europe... They are all invasive species.

Thousands of years ago, cave-men accidentally drove pleistocene megafauna to extinction.



Is there a difference in all of that? I say: No.
Intelligence does not separate mankind from nature. Mankind's actions are nature's actions, it's only the magnitude compared to other life-forms' actions that makes it seem like a difference.

If mankind wipes out a species, then mankind has retroactively gained the right to wipe out a species.
If mankind develops a killer-virus that wipes mankind out, or sabotages the climate to a degree that mankind can no longer compete with other life-forms, or invents a species of intelligent robots which then exterminates mankind in a bloody apocalyptic war, then this is totally fine.
If a species fails to survive in the onslaught of mankind, then it deserved to die.
If mankind fails to survive in the onslaught of some development, then mankind deserves to die.

There is no universal moral protecting one's right to live.
You are alive? You deserve being alive.
You dead? You deserve being dead.
Who avenged the deaths of the dead bacteria? Who avenged the deaths of the dinosaurs? Who avenged the deaths of the megafauna? Who protected them?
There is nobody. Nature does not care. So why should we, one among many children of Nature, fighting for survival against all of our brethren and sisters, care?

And even if there were some authority saving species from the brink of extinction (like in Futurama), the question remains:
Why would they save a species? To what end?
And who would they save? Everybody? All the bacterias that can't breathe oxygen? Or just cute life-forms?

Why does mankind save species from the edge of extinction? The motives are deeply, deeply selfish: Those species are or might be crucial to a balance of nature that keeps mankind alive. Whether we keep them alive because we need them to keep another species in check or whether we want to keep their genetic potential around, just in case, all of our motives are selfish and geared towards mankind.




Does mankind have the right to modify other life-forms to better suit its needs? Absolutely:
* Read the article above: Plants stole the blueprint for photosynthesis from bacterias. If plants are allowed to do that, why aren't we?
* Wasps steal genes from viruses and put them to use: http://www.democraticunderground.com/122832391 If wasps are allowed to do that, why aren't we?

And mankind has already shaped so many species:
* Avocados are relics of the pleistocene era. Without humans breeding them for consumption, they would be unable to reproduce in large numbers and fend off extinction.
* Dogs have been bred to develop all sorts of anatomic deformations that would get them killed in nature, but we think it's cute.
* Wild hogs have 12 ribs, domestic swine have 16 ribs. What do you think were they come from?

Mankind has even influenced its own evolution by preventing deaths (medicine, glasses, dental-care...) and by arbitrarily modifying the rules by which we seek partners for procreation (fashion).



There is no moral argument whether mankind should or should not influence nature. Whatever course of action is chosen and whatever the results may be, if mankind's new plants usher in a new ecological golden era or if those new plants eventually cause mankind's demise, either outcome is perfectly in line with the laws of nature.

And as a final point: I think those new super-plants could give mankind the extra-time it needs to get its shit together.

[The2ndWheel]

9. Can't argue too much with that

Kill someone, and get away with it, that's ok. You earned freedom by not getting caught. Kill someone, but get caught, that's ok too, because whoever built the prison earned the right to make the rules and put you in prison if that prison is still standing.

We're the only species that thinks twice about whatever it that we call killing. Whether it's within our species, or outside of it. To the vast majority of life, killing is just evolution. It's just surviving. Then again, if humanity exterminates Ebola one day, that's just evolution. Same thing if it kills all of us at some point, in some way. Just using Ebola for the sake of argument. It can be anything though.

Literally anything that happens is ok, it just gets clouded by our particular moral judgments. At least these days, since as you point out, nobody really gave a damn back in the day, for various reasons. Of course, if people have moral judgments today, that's ok, whatever those may be. How could a moral argument not exist if they do exist?

I like it. What you're saying is reality. It's completely messy. Even the words that we're using to describe what you're talking about don't do it justice. These are just words that we made up and defined. How much more subjective can you get than that? Which I guess is ok, even if it's limiting.

[GliderGuider]

10. Yes. It is what it is. All else is our embroidery. nt

[Tumbulu]

11. Wow, I did my Master's Degree Research

Last edited Tue Oct 7, 2014, 10:41 AM - Edit history (2)

at Rothampstead.....

Some thoughts..... First of all my objections to the GMO crops are primarily derived from the culture of misrepresentation of fact and cavaleir disregard of real safety (and the lack of evaluation of environmental impact) of these crops. If they had actually been tested by outside disinterested parties and proven safe, I would have a different attitude about them. If the scientists doing the work had not been bullies in the lab and had not lied to the business community who came up with the funds to pay for the work, I may have a more open mind about the technology.

Now, Rothampstead had real scientists, humble, honest, self effacing curious brilliantly intelligent ones. If anyone in the world is going to come up with some positive way to use this technology that the original gene jockeys so arrogantly flaunted, it is this group. Or at least the group that I knew back in the early '80's.

And so I will read with curiosity about how it all unfolds. I have faith in real scientists, not the arrogant hucksters whose mouthpieces pollute our discussions on DU and elsewhere with the all too typical mis truths. Sadly arrogance and hubris like viruses spread....but I will consider it all with a more open mind.